This issue begins with two articles that take gender analysis in innovative new directions. We then continue with several articles that address Britain in the wider world, both in the imperial context and in British relationships with the United States.
We begin our issue with Cynthia Herrup's brilliant, elegant, and conversational plenary address to the North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS) in October 2005, which she presented as the outgoing president. In “The King's Two Genders” Herrup goes beyond the recent gender analysis of the patriarchal justifications for monarchy by drawing on the classic work by Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies. Monarchs were anomalous, exceptional persons, who, as Herrup notes, “defied the set boundaries of mortal and immortal, lay and secular, and single and the corporate” (499). Herrup demonstrates that monarchs “also transcended the confines of a single gender, although not the fears associated with such transcendence” (499). Female monarchs such as Elizabeth I had to celebrate their virile power, but, more surprisingly, male monarchs also had to portray themselves as merciful and nurturing without falling into the trap of effeminacy.
In “Cultivating Woman: Men's Pursuit of Intellectual Equality in the Late British Enlightenment,” Arianne Chernock also takes gender analysis in an innovative direction by discussing the male feminists of the 1790s. Drawing on Locke, Dissenting culture (especially Unitarian), and the Scottish Enlightenment, these men argued that women's educational opportunities should be expanded. Most of these male advocates, according to Chernock, were “instrumentalists,” who believed that women should be educated to become rational companions for their husbands and intelligent mothers to their children. But some of them went even further to become “egalitarians.” One of the most interesting, and least known, is the Scottish lord David Steuart Erskine, who imagined women becoming professors in colleges or, on a lower social scale, engaging in business.
Sudipta Sen's article, “Imperial Subjects on Trial: On the Legal Identity of Britons in Late Eighteenth-Century India,” is an important contribution to the ongoing theme of citizenship and British identity explored in Journal of British Studies 44, no. 4 (October 2005). Focusing on the late eighteenth century, he compares the legal treatment of Jews, Catholics, and Dissenters in England to the treatment of Indian subjects in India. As the British began to establish their empire in India, they had to define the legal status of their native subjects. Were they to be tried as British subjects in British courts, or under Hindu or Muslim law? The answer illuminates the degree to which notions of race and blood shaped British citizenship in the empire.
Rosalyn Jolly's fascinating article “Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Maine, and the Anthropology of Comparative Law” also addresses the question of law in the British empire. Known for his adventure stories, Robert Louis Stevenson was also a serious thinker about comparative cultures. As Jolly demonstrates, Stevenson was haunted by the impact of Roman law and culture on the Western world. He was probably influenced by Henry Maine, who regarded Roman law as an advanced stage in the evolutionary process from primitive law. Maine demonstrated that primitive societies were not without law and used Indian villages’ communal justice as an example. Similarly, Stevenson found that tapu and reciprocity were the social laws that governed life in the South Sea Islands. Jolly argues that despite his evolutionary perspective, Stevenson advocated “the continuing validity of indigenous legal systems” (579) as alternatives to the crushing dominance of Roman law over Western civilization.
We turn to the twentieth century with Mariel Grant's “‘Working for the Yankee Dollar’: Tourism and the Festival of Britain as Stimuli for Recovery.” In the hard years after World War I, the government envisioned the Festival of Britain (1951) as a way to bolster its citizens’ morale and to draw in American tourists and their dollars. At the same time, as Grant cleverly shows, the festival's promoters faced a paradox when it came to the United States. If the festival showcased Britain's recovery from the ravages of war, the Americans might think their aid was no longer necessary. Tourism would help rebuild the economy, but the few hotel rooms available suffered from a lack of soap and towels, and food remained scarce and expensive. Nonetheless, the festival provided a precedent for the state extending itself into the promotion of tourism.
Our final article, by Richard Price, inaugurates a new format: articles that inform readers about recent developments in the field but also make sweeping, provocative arguments. In “One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire, and Their Imperial Culture,” Richard Price critiques new approaches to imperial history. First, he demonstrates the appeal and the limitations of Niall Ferguson's almost celebratory history, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. Then, he assesses “the new imperial history,” which is much more critical of the British empire. As Price shows, these histories remedy the blind spots of traditional imperial history, and he finds much to praise in their subtle delineations of the impact of the empire on imperial culture. At the same time, he points out that the new imperial history tends to concentrate on culture and neglects the economy, chronology, and structure of the state.
